Written and edited by Norm Scott:
EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!! MOBILIZE!!!
Three pillars of The Resistance – providing information on current ed issues, organizing activities around fighting for public education in NYC and beyond and exposing the motives behind the education deformers. We link up with bands of resisters. Nothing will change unless WE ALL GET INVOLVED IN THE STRUGGLE!

Thursday, March 8, 2018

West Virginia: Do-It-Yourself Class Struggle - Jacobin

One lesson from the West Virginia teachers’ strike is clear: nobody is coming to save us. We’ll have to do it ourselves....

....many workers in Wisconsin have argued that it was the intervention of
union officials into the militant upsurge of 2011 that demobilized the
occupation of the capitol building and redirected workers’ energies into
an unsuccessful electoral bid to oust Governor Scott Walker. The calls
for a general strike that echoed through the rotunda represent the road
not taken: had workers relied on their own power rather than deferring
to elected officials and union leaders, things may have turned out
differently...... Kevin Prosen, Jacobin

I bet the people most frightened by the strike are our very union leaders who are probably hoping for swift retribution (which is already beginning - see Ravitch) so they can say to UFT members -- see what happens when you get too militant? We will examine the role Randi and Lily and their reps played in WV - remember the union leaders said they had a settlement and the rank and file revolted. We will delve more into that issue in upcoming posts.

But the strike has been making the mainstream press -- though mainly ignored by the so-called liberal MSNBC and CNN.

Union supporters have claimed that strikes and labor
unrest could happen more frequently if the Supreme Court rules against
mandatory
union fees. But experts aren't so sure.
Read more.

We will delve into the impact of the WV strike -in upcoming posts -- will it increase militancy or not? Like I pointed out above - retribution of some kind is going to come and how that is dealt with is the key. I think they are going to try to fragment the public school system with a heavy choice movement -- kill public education and no state wide strikes.

Kevin Prosen, a MORE member (and cheesehead from Wisconsin) connects a few dots in this post of a few weeks ago.

There's a lot to chew on in Kevin's piece. I don't always agree with his analysis but do agree with most. But I need to spend more time educating myself and will be posting more commentary on WV. It is definitely worth a read and feel free to comment. Here are a excerpts (in red), some in bold by me with comments by me (in black) but read it entirely at https://jacobinmag.com/2018/03/west-virginia-janus-right-to-work-unions.

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court began hearing oral argument in Janus v. AFSCME, a lawsuit that seeks to gut
public sector unions by denying them so called “agency fees,” or
mandatory dues contributions from workers. One component of the
deliberations was the question of “labor peace” — the state’s interest
in stable, predictable labor-management arbitration. Justice Elena
Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and others questioned whether undoing agency
fees would open the door to a more tumultuous and unpredictable
labor-relations regime. The argument on the union side was an
interesting one — in the words of Illinois’s solicitor general Lisa
Madigan, “[w]hen unions are deprived of agency fees, they tend to become
more militant, more confrontational, they go out in search of
short-term gains that they can bring back to their members and say,
‘stick with us.’”

This is an important point often made by union critic Mike Antonucci - labor peace - and the role unions play as partners - often to the detriment of union members - as we've seen in NYC where the UFT often plays an arbiter rather than our advocate -- but that is a reason unions are essential to management. The point made by Kagan and Sotomayor is illustrated in West Virginia where the unions seemed to lose control for a time. Our union leadership's role is to place a brake on wildcat strikes. It didn't work in WV.

As though to prove the point, 200 miles away, across the border in West Virginia, the state’s teachers had voted to extend an ongoing illegal strike
against a Republican legislature that had threatened to drastically
increase the insurance premiums for workers whose pay already ranks
among the lowest in the country. West Virginia is a “right to work”
state, meaning workers are denied the right to collectively bargain or
the stability of the “closed shop,” in which workers automatically
contribute dues to the union whether they sign up or not. Such automatic
collection prevents workers from “free riding” — that is, benefiting
from union activity without contributing equally to the organization’s
finances — while also providing a reliable stream of income to fund the
activities of the union apparatus.

So what we've noticed in all the hysteria over Janus is that it ain't over for unions even in right to work states -- but the thing we have warned those wanting to leave the UFT is that the long-term effects in RTW states are much lower salaries for teachers -- and WV is 48th out of 50 states in the race to the bottom.

Kevin goes on to talk about Wisconsin -- and the lesson for many was the fact that the Democratic Party - Obama, Hillary -- abandoned them. And also the blowback from the neighbors of teachers who seemed happy at what happened to them -- read

The lesson: Make sure your non-teaching neighbors have your back -- do a lot of work out of your classroom -- yes, my friends -- sort of social justicy -- if you lock yourselves in your classroom and then go home -- well, the long-term is not good.

Kevin goes on to talk about the unique role teachers play all over the world in fact -- they are often the first targets - Chile, Turkey, etc -- because as a mass they have contact with almost every family in a nation and have the ability - if organized - to have as much influence as any group.

Teachers are poised to lead
such social movements by virtue of their work as caregivers in schools,
which ties them intimately to wider layers of the working class. As
public employees, their demands are inherently political insofar as they
must be addressed to the state. For this reason they have been
repeatedly thrust to the frontlines of movements against austerity —
Wisconsin in 2011, Chicago in 2013,
and now in West Virginia. The right wing understands this — indeed it
is part of their argument that such organizations “mandate” their
members’ “political speech,” a key contention of anti-union lawsuits
like Janus. By kneecapping teachers’ unions, they strike a blow
against one of the last remaining bastions of working-class economic
power.

What the West Virginia movement shows — with teachers packing lunches
for their students so they wouldn’t go hungry while they walked the
picket line; with picket signs blazoned with images of Harriet Tubman, John Brown, and Martin Luther King, Jr — is that American workers bear no resemblance to their one-dimensional, Hillbilly Elegy-type
portrayals. Workers have no stake in such a debate, based as it is on a
flat, stereotyped image of working-class life. These discussions
imagine us as passive dupes to be pandered to, rather than as agents of
our own destiny, capable of struggling in our own self-interest. West
Virginia is a bracing challenge to this narrative.

Let's remember that W. Virginia went overwhelmingly for Trump - as big a win as anywhere. Did many striking teachers vote for Trump? I bet a good chunk did. When we hear the voices of some of the strikers in commentary from the left like Jacobin are we only hearing voices from left wing activists in WV or are we also hearing from Trump supporters who struck?

We will explore more of this in future posts --
Kevin goes on to differentiate the Wisconsin and W.V struggles and places the point of the spear at our union leadership:

What explains the different trajectories of the two struggles? Many
workers in West Virginia point to the state’s history of explosive
strikes, and indeed these traditions, passed down through families,
constitute one key factor. But Wisconsin also has a history of militant
labor struggle. Ironically, it may be the very weakness of labor unions
in the greater South that left the field open for workers’ own activity;
unlike the stable institutional labor relations that prevailed in
Midwestern states, the union apparatus in West Virginia was largely
hollowed out. While workers didn’t have the benefit of an active union
involved in their day-to-day working lives, they also didn’t have
ingrained habits of deference to union officials. As Jay O’Neal, a
strike activist at Stonewall Jackson Middle School in Charleston,
described to me: “Because there’s been such a surge of activism so
quickly and many new, organic leaders have emerged, I think a lot of
them don’t really have any relationship with the union leadership. I was
in a meeting today and the head of one our state’s teachers’ unions
came in and I heard someone next to me ask, ‘Who’s that?’ Leaders have
emerged from below and are really doing the work.”

We'll be hearing a lot from Jay O'Neal from the left/socialist press. Jay seems connected to the activists and we will see that they probably had an impact in organizing since that is what many have experience doing.

Workers need strong unions, but they also need to organize independently
in the workplace and learn to rely on their own power. Building durable
rank-and-file networks and union caucuses is a crucial next step in revitalizing American labor.

I like this point. I see the work some of us in MORE-Carisma doing around the closing schools issue is along this lines, often with the UFT when it fights - but without them when they don't. And if they see us doing that work and getting results, they try to coopt.

when leaders returned to the picket line to announce a 5 percent wage
increase but without a permanent fix to the public employees’ insurance
system, it seemed enough for them to declare victory and send the
teachers back to work. But workers understood that spiraling health care
costs were the heart of the matter and that the wage hike wouldn’t be
enough to cover them, so they kept the strike going. We know our
interests better than our representatives do, and need to understand
that the union officials work for us, not the other way around. In the
words of one striker, a strike is not simply to earn more benefits from
the state, but to force the state to negotiate with labor on labor’s
terms.

Another great point below. And this one echos what I said above about making sure non-teachers have your backs - which we have often seen inside the UFT:

.... teachers cannot merely fight for their own, narrow interests. To
earn the kind of public support necessary for such a large-scale
struggle, they have to fight to improve the conditions of the working
class as a whole. It is too easy to isolate workers who define their
interests narrowly.

Kevin ends with comments about the role in all this on the part of the American left:

lessons for America’s burgeoning young left as well. Long isolated from
the working class, socialists now have the greatest opportunity in a
generation to close this historic rift. With the stabilizing
institutions of the union movement being dismantled, we are likely
headed for a period of renewed volatility in the labor movement; in
fact, one has arguably already begun. A socialist movement previously
confined to student milieus or eccentric corners of the internet can no
longer be satisfied with passively studying labor history or showing up
to support strikes organized by others. There is a world of difference between being merely interested in the labor movement and being implanted in it.

Kevin is correct about the separation of the left from workers. But then again so much of the left does not come from the working class itself like it did in the 20's and 30s.

From what I've seen in MORE where I mingle a lot with the socialist left, there is a long way to go to close the historic rift. Some people have told me that they don't know anyone not on the left. Check the backgrounds of most people on the left in the UFT. It is not working class. (Just for the record, both my parents were ILGWU garment workers with barely an education.)

At a recent MORE meeting I heard how much people wanted to reach out to those in the UFT who are left-leaning and inside the bubble. The idea of even talking to a Trump voter seemed to make people shudder -- they ought to come to our Passover seder in a few weeks where we expect matzo food fights.

That is why I wonder about the WV striking teachers who voted for Trump. Is the left talking to them too or only leftists?

When we see the leftist press actually talking to those people and connecting to them there is a chance the rift will be breached.

Here is where I agree with Kevin wholeheartedly:

In the post-Janus world, the Left will have to seize the
initiative rather than ceding the field to liberal labor leaders. We
will have to learn the key lesson of West Virginia: nobody is coming to
save us, and great leaps in organization and consciousness don’t appear
like acts of nature. We have to create them ourselves.

There are so many interesting lessons to the story, the next few days will be heavy on WV. So if you are not interested take a vacation from ed notes.

Jacobin events

Solidarity with West Virginia Strikers!Saturday, March 10 • 6:30-9pm • More information
We've been riveted to the labor insurgency in West Virginia, a
glimpse at what workers can achieve when organized and united in
solidarity.

Join us for a discussion featuring West Virginia striking teachers, Emily Comer and Jay O’Neal.
You won't want to miss on the ground reports from the strike, how they
earned wide support, and what lessons can be learned going forward.
This event will be livestreamed at facebook.com/jacobinmag, beginning at 6:50pm.Don't miss Jacobin's coverage of the West Virgnia teachers's strike
At Jacobin we've been racing to keep pace with events in West Virgina. We've featured over a dozen pieces
on the latest developments, providing political or historical context,
and interviewing key participants. Here are some highlights of Jacobin's
coverage:

What the Teachers WonWest Virginia shows that we can fight back and win. We talk to
two teachers to assess the tentative settlement and what comes next.

9 comments:

The Left - whatever that is - needs to do more than just talk to people. It needs to offer them something, like universal material benefits such as health care, free or reduced-cost college education, etc.

Unless and until that happens, the Left will be talking to itself, and we see where that's led us.

My father was a member of the UAW. A substantial number of my regular contacts are Trump supporters. They do not differ praticularly from other people I know. It would be a step forward to rise above the identity politics stereotyping typical of the DNC. I have tired of returning surveys with public school education scrawaled in red marker. The Hillary Clinton sector of the Democratic Party has no interest in voters like me. They would sell me out to a TFA in a charter school in a New York minute. Labor is an antiquated notion for them that does not fit neatly into their neoliberal meritocracy sensibilities.

For a successful mass movement, people don’t have to agree on partisan politics, on religion, or anything else for that matter. But they do have to come together and fight in solidarity around a shared issue. We’ve learned that people will push the other differences aside in the name of solidarity.

Just reread Homage To Catalonia about the Spanish civil War in 1936 by George Orwell. Great parallels and lessons for today. Guess which group kept the workers militias virtually unarmed against fascist Franco. Guess which group controlled the media propaganda after their victory in Madrid. Guess which group vowed to crush the anarchists (very strong in Catlonia) after Franco was defeated. Guess which group forever soured Orwell about their motives and agenda. Yes! The Russian Communists who were ostensibly in Spain to help the workers.

Yes James. I didn't read that but did read Orwell material and it was clear he too was an anti-Stalin Communist - A Trotskyist of sorts and he fought with the Trotsky group which Stalin viciously viewed as the bigger enemy - remember that ice ax in the head. To the very end Orwell was aligned in some ways with the left - he was a leftist in some ways on the order of many of our friends in ICE and MORE currently. Animal Farm and 1984 are condemnations of Stalinism not necessarily socialism. He did not defend capitalism and maybe had anarchist sympathies. At least from the little I've read. The right has always used him.

Comments are welcome. Irrelevant and abusive comments will be deleted, as will all commercial links. Comment moderation is on, so if your comment does not appear it is because I have not been at my computer (I do not do cell phone moderating).

UFT Election Vote Comparison: 2004-10

A Personal Historical Perspective

Why Karen Lewis Reads Ed Notes

"A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

What media call "philanthropy" for the public schools are actually seed monies to establish a private "market" in publicly-financed education - an enterprise worth trillions if successfully penetrated by corporate America. Cory Booker, one of the "New Black Leaders" financed by the filthy rich, is key to creating a "nationwide corporate-managed schools network paid for by public funds but run by private managers.

"Ed Reformers" want to cash in on public education and to control its content and outcome, not improve it. Provide great education? Baby boomers had as close as this country has ever gotten to it when we were growing up. The Ed Reform Movement has no interest in seeing such a well-educated, democratically astute population ever again.

History of the UFT Pre-Weingarten Years

This award-winning series of articles by Jack Schierenbeck originally appeared in the New York Teacher in 1996 and 1997.

Naturally, from a certain point of view. But, despite certain biases, Schierenbeck, a great guy, was one of the best NY Teacher reporters so this is worth reading. Jack suffered a debilitating stroke many years ago (I used to get secret donations to ed notes from him through a 3rd source.)

“The schism in the union over radical politics [is] a major reason for stalling the growth of a teacher union for decades.” Revolutionary politics and ideology take center stage, as the original Teachers Union becomes a battlefield, pitting leftist against leftist and splitting the union.

Clarence Taylor's "Reds at the Blackboard" focused on the old Teachers Union which disbanded in 1964 after suffering from anti-left attacks.

Effective Union Organizing

A video series put together by Jason Mann from the British Columbia Federation of Teachers about social media and how to use it for effective union organizing.

The first series was called New Media For Union Activists Roadmap and it's still available on-line at:http://www.newmediabootcamp.ca/welcome/I watched some of them and need to rewatch as they are loaded with information.

The second series started last week and it's called "Online Campaigning for Union Activists"

You Don't Have A Choice - Join the Revolt

Hedges says, There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history.

Ex-Harlem Success Teacher Comments on Eva the Diva

I am a former Harlem Success teacher. Not many people who work/worked for her like her very much. I once made the comment that she is very nice when I first was hired. Two of her closest colleague responded immediately almost in unison, "Eve is not nice!" Over time I realized that there was a lot of political games going on. Another colleague once said to me that he was tired of "being part of a political campaign." Sending out 15,000 applications for only 400 seats in a school is reprehensible. The money that paid for those mass mailings could have paid the yearly salary of another teacher not to mention the heartache of all those parents who applied but did not get a spot. She does good work trying to give disadvantaged students a quality public school education but at a great cost to staff AND the school's educational budget! school budget.

GEM's Julie Cavanagh Debates E4E member on NY1 on LIFO and Seniority

Davis Guggenheim Compared to Riefenstahl

“Waiting for Superman" is the second most intellectually dishonest piece of documentary work I have seen. It is surpassed only by Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," the pro-Hitler propaganda classic, in that regard. Uses personal narratives of adorable children to create narrative suspense that overrides public policy discussion with pure emotion in unscrupulous attack on teachers and their unions, among others

Timothy TysonProfessor of African American Studies and HistoryDuke University

A Familiar Voice on Unions

"We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike"- Adolf Hitler, May 2, 1933

How Teaching Experience Makes a Difference

Even as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Rhee and others around the nation are arguing for experienced teachers to be laid off regardless of seniority, every single study shows teaching experience matters. In fact, the only two observable factors that have been found consistently to lead to higher student achievement are class size and teacher experience, so that it’s ironic that these same individuals are trying to undermine both.- Leonie Haimson on Parents Across America web site

Outsource our children

Weingarten/Gates Foundation announce drone-driven teacher evaluation

According to a press release issued by the Gates Foundation, the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, these three have entered a ground-breaking partnership to evaluate teachers utilizing the drone technology that has revolutionized warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. A bird-size device floats up to 400 feet above a classroom and instantly beams live video of teachers in action to agents at desks at Teacher Quality Inspection Stations established by the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

When asked if the drones were authorized to drop bombs on teachers who exhibit inadequacy, Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, replied, "Don't be ridiculous. Gates money puts other methods at our disposal."

Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5-million-member American Federation of Teachers said the powerful union has signed on to the drone project...

Teacher Value-Added Data Dumping by Norm Scott

The Real Reason Behind Push for Standardized Tests: It's All About the Adults

On standardized testing in our schools

A must read article about the standardized test industry.Written by an insider who has worked as a test scorer, the article outlines a multinational industry based on an army of temporary workers paid by the piece at $0.30 to $0.70 per test, translated in the need to grade 40 tests per hour to make a $12 salary. The article goes on to show how the companies gauge the grading "results" based on the need to ensure new contracts to continue profiting off of our youth. The original article is from Monthly Review. Here it is on Schools Matter blog.

From Sharon Higgins

Parallels between America today and Germany in the 1920's and early 30's

"Resentment and obstruction are all the right wing in America have to peddle. Their policies are utterly discredited. Their ideology - even by its own standards - is a sham. They are so bereft of leaders, their de facto leader is a former drug addicted, thrice-divorced radio talk show host. That is literally the best they can muster. But they have built a national franchise inciting the downwardly mobile to blame the government, not the right, for their problems, exactly as Hitler did in the 1920s."

Chicago View of Unity/UFT on Charters

After many meetings and debates, the Chicago delegation succeeded in working with the New York United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 (UFT) to push the AFT to take stronger stands on charter school accountability and school closings — though many delegates from Chicago would have liked the language to have been even stronger.

Generally speaking, the New York delegation represented organizing charters as the best model for handling their role in reshaping unions, despite the fact that according to many reports few charter schools in New York have been organized as is the case in Chicago. This logic is the same touted by the Progressive Caucus of the AFT. The few that have been organized are a part of the UFT local though they have separate contracts negotiated with the help of UFT. The Chicago delegation reflection the mindset that allowing new charters to continue to proliferate while attempting to organize existing charters is an end game in which public schools and the union lose.

Ed Notes Greatest Hits: HSA Rally and Founding of GEM

Angel Gonzalez and I attended that rally and used the footage to promote our conference on Mar. 28, 2009, which is where the concept of a group like GEM emerged. Until then we had basically been a committee of ICE working with the NYCORE high stakes testing group. The actions of Eva and crew helped spawn GEM. Mommie Dearest!!

I have more video somewhere. I was hoping to get Leni Riefenstahl to edit it but she died. We would have called it "Triumph of the Hedge Fund Operators."

Video of Chicago's George Schmidt and CORE Shredding Arne Duncan and the Chicago Corporate Model

Great Post on Teacher Quality at the Morton School

I'm very tired of the myth that schools are bursting at the seams with apathetic, unskilled, surly, child-hating losers who can't get jobs doing anything else. I recently figured that, counting high school and college where one encounters many teachers in the course of a year, I had well over 100 teachers in my lifetime, and I can only say that one or two truly had no place being in a classroom.